Much Ado About Cognition

摘要

The Bounds of Cognition, by Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Pp. xiii + 197. H/b £50.00/$78.95, P/b £19.99/$29.95. Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind, by Robert D. Rupert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 268. H/b £37.50/$55.00, P/b £18.99/$29.95. Where in physical space lies the machinery of mind and cognition? Is mind all ‘in the head’ or might parts of the enabling physical apparatus underlying at least some of our mental states and processes be spread across brain, (extra-neural) body, and even (extra-bodily) world? In these two laudably clear, rewarding, and challenging treatments, we are offered reasons to be sceptical. The central target of each treatment is the radical-sounding claim that the local physical machinery whose whirrings and grindings make minds like ours possible is not (or not always) fully contained by the ancient metabolic boundaries of skin and skull. Such a claim, despite its radical-sounding nature, can be found (in varying degrees, and in one form or another) in a wide variety of recent treatments, spanning philosophy (e.g. Wilson 1994, 2004; Haugeland 1998; Hurley 1998; Clark and Chalmers 1998; Rowlands 1999, 2003, 2006; Noë 2004, 2009; Wheeler 2005; Menary 2007; Sutton 2010); psychology (e.g. Thelen and Smith 1995; Spivey et al. 2004; Gray et al. 2006), robotics and dynamical systems theory (e.g. Beer 2000) and beyond (e.g. Hutchins 1995; Malafouris 2008; Roepstorff 2008). Philosophically, it is to be distinguished from more standard externalist claims (such as those made by Putnam (1975) and by Burge (1979, 1986)) about the role of the distal environment in the fixation of content. It is to be distinguished also from any mere modal claim to the effect that the machinery of mind might — perhaps in some strange or alien beings, or even in some future incarnation (transcarnation?) — of humanity, be smeared across more than the neural economy. Instead it is the claim, sometimes dubbed ‘the extended mind hypothesis’ following the coinage in Clark and Chalmers 1998, that the physical vehicles (for this usage see Hurley 1998, Ch. 8) of some of our actual cognitive states and processes might include more than the usual neural suspects. Such cases might include the functioning (subject perhaps to various additional requirements of sufficient degrees of reliability, availability, and agentive trust) of a notebook or an iPhone, where these — and hence, the specific encodings of information that they ‘vehicle’ — appear as elements in an integrated web of causal machinery whose combined action enables the guidance and modulation of an agent’s behaviour in some of the ways distinctive of cognitive or mental states. The central example given in Clark and Chalmers 1998 concerned the state of dispositionally believing such and such to be the address of a particular art gallery. That state, Clark and Chalmers maintained, might be realized either by states of the neural apparatus alone or by various combinations of neural and non-neural resources. These could include the biological system plus written entries in a constantly-carried and fluently deployed notebook or (for a more contemporary version) plus entries in the memory of a portable device such as an iPhone. The former, in extremely rough outline, is sometimes referred to as the case of ‘Otto’: a mildly (biologically) memory-impaired agent whose success depends frequently upon such notebook-based encodings.